It's a free service that's widely used by people who want to circumvent firewalls. They're ad-sponsored - once you connect to the service, you'll see a banner add in a frame at the top of the page (it's easy enough to disable or ignore). I only use it for watching geographically restricted videos on SciFi and Hulu. Works for me. YMMV, Caveat Emptor, Do Not Eat, etc.
The truly fascinating thing about this case was to see how it polarized geeks everywhere. People had strong opinions, although I suspect that everyone outside the courtroom was relying on indirect information from news reports and opinionated bloggers/forum members to jump to conclusions.
Who started the habit of saying "200% more expensive" instead of "three times the price?" It doesn't make any sense to use percentages greater than 100 - no one buys 48/16ths of a gallon of milk, after all.
Things get awkward when people talk about harnessing the power of crowds to improve complex predictions. A question like, "What will the price of oil be in five years?" is damn near impossible to answer without a time machine because it completely fails to factor in unpredictable economic & political disruptions (9/11, some guy inventing a portable fusion generator in his basement, alien invasion, global war, or pandemic). In fact, the financial markets are a great example of "the wisdom of crowds" looking more like "the wisdom of sheep."
Humans are forced to take analytical shortcuts when observing the world, and the process involves heavy socialization. We can spot a crazy (and potentially dangerous) street person in mere moments. We can judge the social standing of a person within seconds. It's one reason that branding works so well, because we can be trained to think, "Mmm, BMW good. Macintosh good" without pausing for hours of tedious analysis. The trouble is that socialization plays a massive role in our views of the world. Any "educated guess" we make about the possibility of a future pandemic or going to war with the Vogons will be colored by our social network - what our friends think, what our favorite bloggers think, what the media tells us. It is a rare soul who can step out from the crowd to see the forest for the trees.
You dad needs to figure out a way to encourage people to reuse metal coat hangers. I bet that offering a 25 cent discount would do the trick. Everyone would "save" money.
My wife and I have taken thousands of digital photos and videos since 2002, but the cold, hard truth is that the vast majority of them just aren't very good. I suspect the OP is in the same boat. The solution is to take the time to identify the best images and videos. This should result in a relatively compact archive only a few hundred digital photos and videos. This "best of" collection will be much easier to duplicate in different format and making physical prints on archival quality paper won't put a huge dent in your pocketbook. Remember that just because you can take 2000 photos of your spittle-covered toddler doesn't mean that you need to keep them all.
Chances are pretty good that your great grandchildren aren't going to give a damn about inheriting a massive archive of pictures and videos starring weirdly dressed dead relatives they've never met, and if it's physically large it stands a good chance of ending up in a garden shed or unprotected lunar storage pod. If you condense your family album into something more manageable, it will be more accessible and enjoyable for all - now and in the future.
* If a router is handing out IPs, how is that stealing? *
It's probably not, if you're assigned IP address. But things are a bit different when you start *taking* the subscriber's bandwidth, especially if you do it for months on end. To use the dreaded coffee shop analogy, you're welcome to grab a chair at an empty table (the IP address), but I think they'd get annoyed if you helped yourself to a vanilla no fat extra hot soy and goat cheese latte every morning.
An excellently written letter. I just grabbed a copy and made a couple of tweaks before sending it to my M.P. in Alberta. Thanks for sharing it with us!
*If you spoke this out loud, you'd be interrupted by billions of people who would be willing to go into space at the drop of a hat.*
I think you're significantly overestimating. Merrill Lynch estimated that there were about 95,000 people in the world with personal fortunes of $30 million or more in 2006. If even 1% of those people wanted to book a trip to the ISS, Space Adventures would have almost 1000 applications piled on their desks. But they don't.
I'm jealous and also quite in awe of how brave people are to venture into space. Some sobering stats on manned space flight: 18 of the 430 people who've ventured into space didn't make it back alive. Of course, quite a few astronauts and cosmonauts have flown more than once, but I calculate that the shuttle's overall fatality rate is running at around 1.8%. IOW, the chance of dying is about the same as my chance of winning $10 in this week's 6/49 Lotto. I hope he has a fantastic trip and that he blogs about his experience.
Would I be willing to venture into space if given the chance? I'm not sure. I'd love to have the opportunity to consider it, though.
Yeah, sorry. That was overly paternalistic of me. All I was just trying to communicate is that I've wasted a lot of money on gadgets in the past and if I had the chance to do it all again, I wouldn't bother.
I'm not bitter - just trying to point out that this stuff is really expensive and largely unnecessary. I went through the Newton, the Palm, a dozen cellphones and heaven knows what other stuff. It all seemed brilliant at the time, but in hindsight it was just mindless consumerism. You'll figure it out in a few years, too.:)
You've got me backwards. I'm mortgage free in my 30s because I *don't* buy a constant stream of expensive electronic toys. My frustration stems from seeing my friends struggle with massive mortgage and consumer debt because they didn't grasp the full meaning of, "buy now, pay later." By all means enjoy your iPhone. You're amortizing Apple's R&D so I can enjoy bargain priced iPods in the future.:)
My point is that it's a complete waste of money, especially in a country where 8.8% of homeowners with mortgages are behind on their payments. After realizing that I was using my cell less and less in the past couple of years, I chose not to renew my contract and switched to a prepaid service last year. It saves me a lot of money that was quite literally being wasted.
In a few hours he web will be flooded with thousands of news articles and blog posts trumpeting Apple's "50% price drop" when it's complete rubbish because people are ignoring the total cost of ownership. In actuality, the decrease is probably in the range of 10%, depending on the plan you take. Not nearly as newsworthy, is it? Have fun in the reality distortion field, but remember that you're still on the hook for that expensive trinket if your job vaporizes 18 months from now.:)
My wife and I both have prepaid phones that we use sparingly and our total cost is under $20/month. As we hit our 30s and started a family, our use patterns changed dramatically - we're no longer 20-something party animals who need to be yapping/smsing on the phone to everyone throughout the day. We saved almost $500 in cell charges last year without changing our behavior.
Oops. I forgot AT&T's $36 new line activation fee and their monthly Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge of up to $1.25. The grand total now stands at $1704.76.
From the apple site: "# Requires new 2-year AT&T rate plan, sold separately." In other words, there's no such thing as a $199 iPhone. Plans start at $59.99, so you're looking at a minimum outlay of $1638.76 plus tax over two years.
The weak point of this idea (apart from the fact that they stand a good chance of really pissing off a few million users and getting shot) is that it's very hard to drop a stick-up note on someone's computer and expect the payment not to be traced. You can be that someone will go to jail for a nice long time if they request payment by Visa or Mastercard. Same goes for wire transfers, paypal and most other forms of payment. Even cash would cause problems as soon as the friendly Postwoman in Vladivostok realized that you were getting thousands of mysterious envelopes filled with cash from all corners of the globe.
I should rush off to trademark Muon, Quark, Lepton, Meson and Positron. But seriously, the sudden movement at the bottom of the processor market highlights a seismic shift toward ultra portables. The Asus eee was the vanguard, and I suspect we'll see literally dozens of decent machines in this market segment by the end of the year. It remains to be seen whether anyone will actually make money in this segment, though. Asus set the bar low with a $299 machine and consumers are expecting to be bowled over by increasingly capable machines at that price point.
*Doesn't this make the Wii the greenest? OK, so it may not be the easiest to recycle, but it's an order of magnitude better on power consumption!*
Not only that, but from a physical perspective the Wii is far smaller than the PS3 or 360 and has a lower component count. It follows logically that it requires far less toxic soup to manufacture and the process consumes less energy. I suspect that a much larger percentage of Wiis are being used with old standard definition TVs, too (since the Wii tops out at 480p). Those older CRTs draw more power, although one doesn't have to factor in the environmental cost of manufacturing a new flat panel. And, honestly, recycling is a moot point in most of North America - we have a very immature electronics recycling industry.
The day will eventually come when the last human will walk the earth, just as the last dinosaur once plodded to extinction in the far distant past. The difficulty with such a vast population is that we still exhibit many pack-building skills that don't work well in many modern situations - we exhibit in-group bias and much of life is spent attempting to build exclusive social hierarchies. The result is that we divide ourselves by religion, language, skin color and fashion and start irrationally arguing that our group is the chosen one. Add in a few advanced weapons and the result is like watching a group of preschoolers attempting to juggle swords.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a free service that's widely used by people who want to circumvent firewalls. They're ad-sponsored - once you connect to the service, you'll see a banner add in a frame at the top of the page (it's easy enough to disable or ignore). I only use it for watching geographically restricted videos on SciFi and Hulu. Works for me. YMMV, Caveat Emptor, Do Not Eat, etc.
Grab a copy of Hotspot Shield and enjoy the same streaming media that red blooded Americans enjoy - hotspotshield.com
The truly fascinating thing about this case was to see how it polarized geeks everywhere. People had strong opinions, although I suspect that everyone outside the courtroom was relying on indirect information from news reports and opinionated bloggers/forum members to jump to conclusions.
Who started the habit of saying "200% more expensive" instead of "three times the price?" It doesn't make any sense to use percentages greater than 100 - no one buys 48/16ths of a gallon of milk, after all.
Things get awkward when people talk about harnessing the power of crowds to improve complex predictions. A question like, "What will the price of oil be in five years?" is damn near impossible to answer without a time machine because it completely fails to factor in unpredictable economic & political disruptions (9/11, some guy inventing a portable fusion generator in his basement, alien invasion, global war, or pandemic). In fact, the financial markets are a great example of "the wisdom of crowds" looking more like "the wisdom of sheep."
Humans are forced to take analytical shortcuts when observing the world, and the process involves heavy socialization. We can spot a crazy (and potentially dangerous) street person in mere moments. We can judge the social standing of a person within seconds. It's one reason that branding works so well, because we can be trained to think, "Mmm, BMW good. Macintosh good" without pausing for hours of tedious analysis. The trouble is that socialization plays a massive role in our views of the world. Any "educated guess" we make about the possibility of a future pandemic or going to war with the Vogons will be colored by our social network - what our friends think, what our favorite bloggers think, what the media tells us. It is a rare soul who can step out from the crowd to see the forest for the trees.
You dad needs to figure out a way to encourage people to reuse metal coat hangers. I bet that offering a 25 cent discount would do the trick. Everyone would "save" money.
My wife and I have taken thousands of digital photos and videos since 2002, but the cold, hard truth is that the vast majority of them just aren't very good. I suspect the OP is in the same boat. The solution is to take the time to identify the best images and videos. This should result in a relatively compact archive only a few hundred digital photos and videos. This "best of" collection will be much easier to duplicate in different format and making physical prints on archival quality paper won't put a huge dent in your pocketbook. Remember that just because you can take 2000 photos of your spittle-covered toddler doesn't mean that you need to keep them all.
Chances are pretty good that your great grandchildren aren't going to give a damn about inheriting a massive archive of pictures and videos starring weirdly dressed dead relatives they've never met, and if it's physically large it stands a good chance of ending up in a garden shed or unprotected lunar storage pod. If you condense your family album into something more manageable, it will be more accessible and enjoyable for all - now and in the future.
* If a router is handing out IPs, how is that stealing? *
It's probably not, if you're assigned IP address. But things are a bit different when you start *taking* the subscriber's bandwidth, especially if you do it for months on end. To use the dreaded coffee shop analogy, you're welcome to grab a chair at an empty table (the IP address), but I think they'd get annoyed if you helped yourself to a vanilla no fat extra hot soy and goat cheese latte every morning.An excellently written letter. I just grabbed a copy and made a couple of tweaks before sending it to my M.P. in Alberta. Thanks for sharing it with us!
*If you spoke this out loud, you'd be interrupted by billions of people who would be willing to go into space at the drop of a hat.*
I think you're significantly overestimating. Merrill Lynch estimated that there were about 95,000 people in the world with personal fortunes of $30 million or more in 2006. If even 1% of those people wanted to book a trip to the ISS, Space Adventures would have almost 1000 applications piled on their desks. But they don't.I'm jealous and also quite in awe of how brave people are to venture into space. Some sobering stats on manned space flight: 18 of the 430 people who've ventured into space didn't make it back alive. Of course, quite a few astronauts and cosmonauts have flown more than once, but I calculate that the shuttle's overall fatality rate is running at around 1.8%. IOW, the chance of dying is about the same as my chance of winning $10 in this week's 6/49 Lotto. I hope he has a fantastic trip and that he blogs about his experience.
Would I be willing to venture into space if given the chance? I'm not sure. I'd love to have the opportunity to consider it, though.
Yeah, sorry. That was overly paternalistic of me. All I was just trying to communicate is that I've wasted a lot of money on gadgets in the past and if I had the chance to do it all again, I wouldn't bother.
I'm not bitter - just trying to point out that this stuff is really expensive and largely unnecessary. I went through the Newton, the Palm, a dozen cellphones and heaven knows what other stuff. It all seemed brilliant at the time, but in hindsight it was just mindless consumerism. You'll figure it out in a few years, too. :)
You've got me backwards. I'm mortgage free in my 30s because I *don't* buy a constant stream of expensive electronic toys. My frustration stems from seeing my friends struggle with massive mortgage and consumer debt because they didn't grasp the full meaning of, "buy now, pay later." By all means enjoy your iPhone. You're amortizing Apple's R&D so I can enjoy bargain priced iPods in the future. :)
My point is that it's a complete waste of money, especially in a country where 8.8% of homeowners with mortgages are behind on their payments. After realizing that I was using my cell less and less in the past couple of years, I chose not to renew my contract and switched to a prepaid service last year. It saves me a lot of money that was quite literally being wasted.
In a few hours he web will be flooded with thousands of news articles and blog posts trumpeting Apple's "50% price drop" when it's complete rubbish because people are ignoring the total cost of ownership. In actuality, the decrease is probably in the range of 10%, depending on the plan you take. Not nearly as newsworthy, is it? Have fun in the reality distortion field, but remember that you're still on the hook for that expensive trinket if your job vaporizes 18 months from now. :)
My wife and I both have prepaid phones that we use sparingly and our total cost is under $20/month. As we hit our 30s and started a family, our use patterns changed dramatically - we're no longer 20-something party animals who need to be yapping/smsing on the phone to everyone throughout the day. We saved almost $500 in cell charges last year without changing our behavior.
Oops. I forgot AT&T's $36 new line activation fee and their monthly Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge of up to $1.25. The grand total now stands at $1704.76.
From the apple site: "# Requires new 2-year AT&T rate plan, sold separately." In other words, there's no such thing as a $199 iPhone. Plans start at $59.99, so you're looking at a minimum outlay of $1638.76 plus tax over two years.
What are you referring to as "manufacturing output?" Just try finding an American-made TV set, computer, video game unit or other electronic device.
The weak point of this idea (apart from the fact that they stand a good chance of really pissing off a few million users and getting shot) is that it's very hard to drop a stick-up note on someone's computer and expect the payment not to be traced. You can be that someone will go to jail for a nice long time if they request payment by Visa or Mastercard. Same goes for wire transfers, paypal and most other forms of payment. Even cash would cause problems as soon as the friendly Postwoman in Vladivostok realized that you were getting thousands of mysterious envelopes filled with cash from all corners of the globe.
Yes. All the crumbs in the bottom that "settled during handling" come flying out and make a gigantic mess.
Intel's first Atom-based Mini-ITX board will retail for under $80 in early June: http://tinyurl.com/4pljgf It's almost what you're after...
I should rush off to trademark Muon, Quark, Lepton, Meson and Positron. But seriously, the sudden movement at the bottom of the processor market highlights a seismic shift toward ultra portables. The Asus eee was the vanguard, and I suspect we'll see literally dozens of decent machines in this market segment by the end of the year. It remains to be seen whether anyone will actually make money in this segment, though. Asus set the bar low with a $299 machine and consumers are expecting to be bowled over by increasingly capable machines at that price point.
*Doesn't this make the Wii the greenest? OK, so it may not be the easiest to recycle, but it's an order of magnitude better on power consumption!*
Not only that, but from a physical perspective the Wii is far smaller than the PS3 or 360 and has a lower component count. It follows logically that it requires far less toxic soup to manufacture and the process consumes less energy. I suspect that a much larger percentage of Wiis are being used with old standard definition TVs, too (since the Wii tops out at 480p). Those older CRTs draw more power, although one doesn't have to factor in the environmental cost of manufacturing a new flat panel. And, honestly, recycling is a moot point in most of North America - we have a very immature electronics recycling industry.
The day will eventually come when the last human will walk the earth, just as the last dinosaur once plodded to extinction in the far distant past. The difficulty with such a vast population is that we still exhibit many pack-building skills that don't work well in many modern situations - we exhibit in-group bias and much of life is spent attempting to build exclusive social hierarchies. The result is that we divide ourselves by religion, language, skin color and fashion and start irrationally arguing that our group is the chosen one. Add in a few advanced weapons and the result is like watching a group of preschoolers attempting to juggle swords.